


Halfway House for Life-Addicts

by uglowian



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Challenge Response, Deathfic, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Loss, Other, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-25
Updated: 2013-12-25
Packaged: 2018-01-06 03:39:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1101962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uglowian/pseuds/uglowian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death takes a while to get used to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Halfway House for Life-Addicts

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2013 no_tags challenge.
> 
> prompt: _Andy/Joe - Wingfic_

In the coming day’s thin light, Joe looks unlike anything that Andy has ever seen before.  
  
He sits out on the inn’s porch, watching the east augment in pale shears, the whitish cast of dawn sinking his eyes into strange hollows. He looks attenuated, Andy thinks, worn down to something less than whole. Even his mouth has gone colorless.  
  
He looks up, though, at the sound of Andy stepping through the door.  
  
“You’re up early,” Andy remarks.  
  
Joe blinks, then shrugs. “Pot, kettle.”   
  
“I guess.”  
  
Joe looks back out, eyes to the east, where the land slopes away towards the sea. He’s shirtless, like he walked out here like this in his fraying pajama pants just to watch the arrival of the day. The knobbed ridges on his back that abut his shoulder blades in tight knots seem less prominent, now, than Andy remembers them having been in the recent past—but maybe that’s just the light.  
  
“What has you up?” Joe wants to know.  
  
“I don’t know. I think I had a weird dream.”  
  
“I used to love weird dreams—Maybe.” He sucks his lips over his teeth. “Or weird things. The grotesque.”  
  
That makes sense, though Andy can’t say why. He nods, regardless.  
  
The quiet settles over them, and they watch the dawn in silence—a great and pale unfurling. Joe wraps one arm around himself and rubs at his bicep.  
  
“Travie’s gone,” he says.  
  
Andy looks at him, but Joe keeps his gaze on the brightening horizon, his eyes lucent in their hollows.  
  
“He went last night. It’s weird. I didn’t think—” He halts, his jaw going tight.   
  
A cold, niggling feeling wriggles through Andy’s chest. Joe stands ramrod straight, one arm still wrapped around himself.  
  
“Whatever,” he says.   
  
Andy recalls, dimly, the image of a different man, with darker, shorter hair, and a bigger smile than Joe’s—and he realizes he knows this routine. Bearing witness, or being present. It makes him feel colder, still.  
  
Joe just shakes his head and turns away from the light.  
  
“Whatever,” he says again, and scuffs his heel against the porch.  
  
-  
  
Andy’s memory begins with waking.  
  
White sheets, a bright room, and a breeze that smelled of the sea. A tall man stood at his bedside, his shirt torn open in the back to make room for the curls and coils and swooping lines of silver that arced, bifurcate, out of his back. The sunlight glinted in that armature.  
  
Hi, the guy said, smiling. I’m Travie.  
  
Andy breathed deep. The taste of salt on the back of his tongue. ‘Where am I’ may have been the question to ask—but he thought it and realized he already knew.  
  
How strange.  
  
He sat up, the sheets pooling around his waist. I’m Andy, he said.  
  
Travie’s smile crinkled the corners of his eyes. Welcome to the inn, Andy. You’re just in time for breakfast.  
  
-  
  
“Where’s Joe?”  
  
The smell of coffee wafts through the kitchen. Not all the tenants are here, but most are—shuffling around, filling their mugs or spooning oatmeal into ceramic bowls. A memory settles over Andy like an old ache; a house that isn’t—wasn’t—his, a bank of kitchen windows limned with the dawn. He looks at the woman who asked about Joe.  
  
“I…think he’s taking a walk,” he says.  
  
The woman—Victoria—tilts her head slightly. She holds a mug with long, poised fingers, and her gaze drifts around the kitchen. The finespun silver on her back isn’t as grown out as Travie’s was; its curls make Andy think of ferns or seedlings, still blooming.  
  
“I saw him last night,” Victoria says, quietly. “He’s sad.”  
  
Andy supposes that he knew this, but the word,  _sad_ , still makes him feel cold. It seems he hasn’t heard that word, or thought about that concept, for a very long time.  
  
“Yeah,” he agrees. “I think he is.”  
  
“It happens sometimes. He’ll be okay.”  
  
Andy cuts a glance in her direction. He has the impulse to say that sadness doesn’t always pass, that people carry it around inside them, for their whole lives, until—  
  
He scratches the back of his neck.  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Victoria sips her coffee. “Do you know what chores you’re doing today?”  
  
“No, not yet.”  
  
“Want to help me with mine? I’m cleaning out the pond and doing work in the garden, mostly.”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
Victoria looks at him, her face smooth and unperturbed. “Joe will be okay,” she says again.  
  
Andy winces. “I know, I just—” He breaks off, frowning.  
  
She touches his shoulder. “It’s fine.”  
  
He wonders how she can be so sure, but before he can ask, she drifts away from him, towards the windows. The sun, coming up over the shore, casts her in dazzling silhouette.   
  
-  
  
The inn’s garden is beautiful. Flagstone pathways wind past glassy, in-ground pools and raked rockbeds. The plant growth—vines, and ferns, and twisting trees, mostly—has a wild look to it, teetering just on verge of overgrowth.   
  
He helps Victoria skim algae off the pools, and together they sweep the flagstone paths, Victoria’s silver bunches of curls shimmering between her shoulder blades. All around them, the morning colors itself in; green growth, dark pools, the huge, blue, arc of the sky.   
  
He likes working out here. He remembers the first time that he worked on any chores at all, it was out here, with Travie.   
  
We all pitch in, Travie said. Keep the place nice—you know. It’d be shitty for people to show up here and feel like nobody cares.  
  
Andy nodded in agreement, pulling a rake over the bed of smoothed white stones. It was hot that day, and both he and Travie had pulled off their shirts to work. He remembers, now, looking at Travie’s arms and thinking that, for whatever reason, they looked weirdly bare. He set the rake aside to palm one hand over the other, popping his knuckles. A weird suction feeling. It distracted him from the sudden itch of nervousness prickling at the back of his neck. All of his own body, he thought, must look equally bare.  
  
He held his breath until the feeling passed.  
  
He catches his reflection now on the surface of one of the pools. Vague impressions of his form. It all still looks a little off, but he’s more used to it now.   
  
Have you been here for a long time? he asked Travie, that same day in the garden.  
  
The limbs of Travie’s silver latticework fanned out behind him in the shape of something nameless, profound, and beautiful. He brushed hair out of his face and considered Andy.  
  
I guess so, he said. I don’t know. I don’t think about it so much anymore.  
  
What was it like before you got here?  
  
Travie’s mouth twisted, slightly, his focus gone inward. Searching. You mean, like, what was it like where I came from?  
  
Yeah.  
  
A shrug. The gesture sent a ripple through those arcing silver skeins. And in that instant, catching and refracting the glare of the sun, the strange shapes turned to lucent sheets, light sent glimmering out from Travie’s entire person. He looked at Andy again.  
  
I don’t remember.  
  
Andy looks away from the pool and sets back to his sweeping. It’s easy to get lost in the rhythm of it, to sink into the all-expansive quiet of the coming day. The sun inches higher and his shadow grows shorter. He gives himself over to all of this and doesn’t think about Travie, or about anything, anymore.  
  
-  
  
Joe returns by the time the sun has passed its zenith.  
  
Andy finds him on the porch again, sitting on the balustrade, looking drawn and tired, his bare feet dangling in the open air. There are other tenants down on the beach, little miniature figures moving against the backdrop of the ceaseless sea. Joe, still, wears only his linen pajama pants and nothing else.  
  
“Hey,” Andy says.  
  
Joe’s hair curls in the crook of his neck. He moves his head, just slightly, but doesn’t look at Andy.  
  
“Hey,” he says.  
  
“Do you want to go for a walk?”  
  
“I’ve been walking all day.”  
  
Andy shrugs. “Not with company.”  
  
Joe does look at him now, a weird, unreadable expression on his face. “I’m not going to fall apart if no one’s watching me, you know.”  
  
“I didn’t think so.”  
  
“So…”  
  
“So let’s go for a walk.”  
  
Joe looks back out to the horizon line, where the sea rises and falls in glimmering peaks. A blue that breathes.  
  
“Fine.”  
  
The breeze coming off the water is cool, and smells of salt and brine. They walk in silence, the sand sliding into the shapes of their feet as they move. Again, Andy is struck by the weird familiarity of this—like déjà vu, this being with someone, watching something bleak uncoil from them and billow outward.   
  
A watery recollection tickles in the back of his mind: the same man with dark hair, whose laughter and sadness could fill the space of an entire room. He lets the image drift away from him and they keep on walking, the sun sinking lower.  
  
“I had a wife you know,” Joe says abruptly. “You know—when I. Before. I was married.”  
  
Andy nods. The inn is far behind them, now, the tenants diminished to tiny figurines. As the sun drops, the air grows colder.  
  
Joe knuckles his eyes. “Do you ever think about that?”  
  
“About before?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“I don’t…know. I don’t try to. I dream about it sometimes, I think.”  
  
Joe has stopped walking. He watches Andy with a specific, and quiet desperation.   
  
“Do you remember anyone?”  
  
Andy thinks about Travie’s too-bare arms, about the man with the wide smile, about the house whose architecture deliquesces into mist—  
  
Behind his clavicle: the bright, sudden spiderwebbing of unshattered glass.   
  
“Not all the way,” he says. “Not like I used to.”  
  
Joe scuffs one bare foot in the sand. “Me either.” He blinks, rapidly, and this seems familiar too—an echo of something out of the murk. It makes the fractured space in Andy’s chest ache.  
  
Joe hugs himself. “You want to walk back?”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
They turn back to the inn, its windows lit up now, small rectangles of light in the gloaming. The sand shifts beneath them.  
  
They’re halfway back when Joe speaks again:  
  
“I asked Travie, once—like, last week, actually. I asked him if he remembered anything.”  
  
Andy keeps his eyes on the inn. “What did he say?”  
  
“He said he didn’t remember anything at all.”  
  
“That…makes sense.”  
  
Joe makes a derisive noise. “Sure.”  
  
“I mean—insofar as any of this makes sense, obviously.”  
  
“Obviously.”  
  
Andy rolls his eyes. “I’m just saying.”  
  
“And I’m just saying it’s bullshit.”  
  
“The fact that it makes sense?”  
  
“The fact that it  _happens_.”  
  
“Maybe.” Andy watches the little lit-up windows grow bigger. “It’s…scary. If I really think about it.”  
  
The sea breathes.  
  
He counts off fifteen steps.  
  
When Joe speaks, his voice sounds dry and cracked.  
  
“Yeah. It is.”  
  
-  
  
The inn’s bedrooms all look more or less the same. Walls painted a pastel shade of seafoam green, and double beds made up with white linens. Lacquered floorboards creak beneath a person’s weight.  
  
With the deepening of the night, Andy sits with Joe in his room—not for the first time, though it is the first instance of keeping Joe’s company as a form of…consolation? Comfort? He isn’t sure what name to put on their shared nearness.   
  
They don’t talk any more about what they do and don’t remember and they don’t talk about Andy staying, sitting on the edge of the bed, keeping some cold and empty feeling at bay. Andy thinks the whole thing seems very young, in its strange way. This was some part of boyhood that has escaped him—kinship, fear, and closeness.  
  
He sits with Joe, who seems content to chew at his cuticles and page through a book that he must have gotten from the library downstairs. Andy counts out rhythms in his head. Beyond the door, he can hear the sounds of feet whispering over hardwood. Tenants going to their beds.   
  
Time passes. He bobs one foot. Each new rhythmic ideation takes on a different shape in his mind. He taps them out, quietly, against his thighs.  
  
After a while, he looks at Joe to find him asleep, the book slumped open against his chest.  
  
-  
  
His own dreams bring him to a different place, always. Bright fragments of some other time, vanished upon waking.  
  
A big lake and a big city. And beyond all that, a bigger country, still.  
  
Beneath him, the susurrus of a road scrolling towards some inevitable drop.   
  
He dreams of Pete, and of Patrick, and of a summer vanished into shimmering light and for an instant, he feels full to brimming with raucous sound.   
  
In a diner somewhere in Nowheresville, Kentucky, Patrick and Joe have an actual, twenty-minute-long argument about the relative merits of a Star Wars-Star Trek crossover universe that he decides he’s better off not getting into until, unexpectedly, Joe looks at him and, just as surely as he is full of sound, bright and ceaseless and electric, he finds himself full, too, of the profundity of  _knowing_.  
  
And then he wakes.  
  
No sound but the tide in the night. Stars outside his window.   
  
A filament of memory goes dark.  
  
He rolls over and exhales. In his back, between his shoulder blades, something itches.  
  
-  
  
Joe doesn’t seem better in the morning, but he also doesn’t leave again, to wander somewhere out of sight. Small blessings, Andy supposes.   
  
The days march on. Nothing improves. The other tenants rearrange their time and the rhythm of the inn to swallow up the space left by Travie’s absence—and it would be fine, Andy thinks, were it not for Joe’s bleakness.  
  
It’s the first time that he wishes for the quiet of the unremembered.  
  
He watches Joe and doesn’t know what to do.  
  
“It will pass,” Victoria says, with placid confidence.   
  
They’re preparing dinner together, and Andy watches her long fingers roll and shape dough into knots. The kitchen smells of cinnamon. He thinks of something else; another moment from the past lit up in the crenellations of his mind.   
  
Light through celluloid.  
  
Then nothing.   
  
Victoria keeps speaking. “Travie was the first of us to go since Joe’s been here. Sometimes that’s hard.”  
  
Andy wants to ask if it was ever hard for her, or for Travie, or for anyone else—but he doesn’t. The silvered curls at her back have bound themselves into branches and joints; they define reticulated space, now, and whisper like glass windchimes when she moves.   
  
He reaches for that spark of memory brought on by the cinnamonsmells, but it’s gone now, like his dreams. A truth faded completely into white, white light.  
  
-  
  
He was there, once, when someone went.   
  
A pretty woman, with big eyes. The strange designs spread out of her back, taller and broader than any he’d seen on the other tenants. They were bright and pale, like armatures spun out of moonlight. He liked her.  
  
He remembers standing with her, down by the sea, the water foaming around their feet.  
  
It’s quiet, she said. The breeze tugged her hair back from her face, and all of her looked desaturate somehow, like all the color of her being had faded away, leaving behind the wisps of something brightlighted and fragile in the shape of a person.  
  
Quiet? he asked.  
  
She touched her temple. All of her grew thinner and brighter.   
  
Yeah, she said.  
  
The sunlight refracted in the tall ravelings spun out from her back. She tipped her head to one side and all that silvered linework shimmered, rippled, and spread. Out. Out. The structure of her being diminished.  
  
There aren’t words for anything anymore, she said. Everything is quiet.  
  
He can’t remember the precise moment when she went—he knows, only, that suddenly she was gone. He stood looking at the place where she had been so briefly eclipsed in something dazzling. There remained, for some unmeasured stretch of time, an afterimage of threadlike armatures fanned out in the air.  
  
He watched them fade and thought of gossamer and fireflies.  
  
The sea sucked at his feet.  
  
-  
  
“Do you remember how you got here?” Joe asks him.  
  
Andy looks up. They’re sharing the duties of changing out the linens on all the beds. He picks up a bundle of white sheets.   
  
“How I got here?”  
  
“Yeah, like—you know. What happened.”  
  
Andy reaches back through the diminished labyrinth of his recollection. The skin between his shoulder blades itches. “I don’t think so. Do you?”  
  
“No.” Joe sounds tired. “I don’t.” He tugs a hand through his hair. “I don’t remember when I forgot.”  
  
Andy wants to say that it’s okay, that maybe it’s like being born; no one forgets, they just never could remember it in the first place.   
  
Instead, he rolls his shoulders and drops the sheets into a basket, letting the  _whush_  of sound punctuate the moment. Joe blows out an irritated breath.   
  
“I just don’t get it, you know?”  
  
Andy picks the basket up. “Get what?”  
  
Joe waves a hand. “All of it. I think—like. I think about Travie and how he just forgot and I don’t get—” He breaks off, choked, and glares out the window. A breath. “I don’t miss her.”  
  
“Her?”  
  
“Marie. I don’t miss her. I don’t remember what it’s like to miss her.”  
  
Andy thinks of waking in the dark, some new fragment of his life curled up, away from him, like wings of smoke bluing into the night.  
  
“It’s not your fault,” he says.  
  
Joe clicks his tongue, a frustrated noise. He doesn’t answer otherwise.  
  
-  
  
A different night, a different dream.  
  
Pete, on the other end of the phone, a cautious quality to the timbre of his voice.  
  
How’s the hardcore thing? How’s touring?   
  
Good, and good.  
  
And Joe—how’s Joe?  
  
And the world reshapes, and he sits, now, behind a kit, watching a floor full of kids seethe and surge to a song that he both knows and can’t remember. The air crackles with an inimitable vitality, and downstage, directly in his line of sight, Joe stands caught in the glare of the stagelights, his fingers flying down the frets, all of him alight with sound, with rhythm, dizzying and electric, an amplified heartbeat promising that he, and Andy, and all of them are alive, alive, alive.  
  
Joe’s good, he says, and somehow, he can feel Pete suck in a steadying breath.  
  
Good.  
  
And you?  
  
A pale laugh. The sound turned down. I’m hanging in there. I’m thinking about doing this…electronica thing, maybe.  
  
Awesome.   
  
Yeah.  
  
The scene and the sound dissolving into motes of light. Joe cut out in profile, draped over with a brightening aureole. Andy can’t hear the rhythm anymore.  
  
I miss you, Hurley.  
  
Everything, suddenly, as fragile and as clear as spun glass.   
  
I miss you too.  
  
These words into nothing.   
  
Wake.   
  
-  
  
Joe keeps staring at the open back of Andy’s shirt.   
  
“Doesn’t it hurt?”  
  
The pale spines, not yet long enough to curl over each other, glimmer in the space between Andy’s shoulder blades.  
  
“No,” he says. “They make me feel lighter, actually.”  
  
“Lighter?”  
  
“Yeah. Like I have hollow bones or something.”  
  
“Huh.”  
  
The ridgelines on Joe’s back, the ones where all the silver parts of him will eventually grow, are the same as they have been for weeks. Skin imperforate.   
  
They’re walking the beach again, collecting smoothed stones from the sand and throwing them back into the sea. A great deal of time is spent in this place just walking or idling—Andy wonders if he might have found it boring, once.  
  
Joe glances at the spiny, silvered clusters again. He opens his mouth, hesitates, and then looks away.  
  
“What?” Andy asks.  
  
“Nothing.”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
Joe frowns out at the horizon line. “It’s pointless.”  
  
“We aren’t exactly in pursuit of pointedness here.”  
  
Joe makes a face. “Whatever.”  
  
Andy shrugs. “Okay.”   
  
He keeps on walking, feeling the sand shift underneath him.  
  
“I think I knew you,” Joe blurts, after a moment.  
  
Andy halts and looks at him. “What?”  
  
“I think I knew you. Before here.” He gestures towards Andy’s arm. “You looked different—you had tattoos or something. I can’t really remember.”  
  
Andy studies him standing there, the sunbleached fringes of his hair twisting in the breeze. He tries to place Joe somewhere that isn’t here. Tries to imagine a world away from this. He knew it once, he thinks—maybe. Now, though, there’s only dust.  
  
Joe watches him, waiting.  
  
“I don’t remember,” Andy says. He can feel that fractured place behind his sternum.   
  
Joe just shrugs and looks back out to the sea. “It’s okay,” he says. “It doesn’t matter. We’re not there anymore.”  
  
It’s true, Andy knows, but that doesn’t make the ache—an echo of some long-forgotten fondness—hurt any less.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he says.  
  
Joe tosses a stone. “Don’t be. Even if you don’t remember, it helps.”  
  
“What helps?”  
  
“Knowing that I knew you.”  
  
The sun shines down, warm and bright. “How do you mean?”  
  
Joe shrugs. “Everything else—Marie, my whole life, whatever it was like—it’s all gone. I can’t get any of it back.” He squints out at the water. “But you’re here, and you were with me there…and, I don’t know. That makes it easier to be here, I guess.”  
  
Andy stares at him. “Oh.”  
  
Joe rocks up onto the balls of his feet. “Let’s keep walking?”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
They go, falling in step with one another. A specific rhythm.  
  
In time the tide rises to wash away their footprints.  
  
-  
  
  
 _fin_


End file.
